Milwaukee Noir

by Tim Hennessy

  The situation outside seemed calm enough, so I sat. “Thanks.”

  “They didn’t get you overnight.”

  “That’s true.” My coming out gay was a shock to my nice Mexican Catholic family. I never dated boys in high school, making me seem like an even nicer Catholic girl. When I told my mom at nineteen, she was devastated. My dad stopped speaking to me. After a couple months of silent dinners, I took the hint and moved out. It was two years before Mami could look at me without tears in her eyes, but eventually she and Papi softened up, and I was allowed back into the fold.

  “They’ll come around, Carlos.”

  “I doubt it. You heard what my mother said to me, wishing I was dead.”

  “It’s family. They’ll get over it. Nothing more important than family, right, primo?” I put a hand on his knee, squeezed it, trying to lighten the mood.

  He jerked his knee away. “I said don’t touch me.”

  “Sorry.” I stood and stepped back to lean against the opposite wall.

  “You don’t have to stand—it’s just . . .” He waved a hand at me. A shadow passed over his wrinkled brow.

  “Something else going on, Carlos?”

  He stared down at his hands, then rubbed them together and cracked his knuckles, the routine he went through just before he spilled something big. He went through the motions a few more times until there was nothing left to crack, then set his black eyes on mine. “You can’t tell nobody.”

  I shook my head. “Course not.”

  Carlos chewed on his lower lip as he worked the first few words out. I couldn’t help but think that he looked like the girl he no longer wanted to be, pretty and scared.

  “In the army . . .” his voice was high and shaky, “I was part of this ad hoc crew they had stationed way out in the boondocks. Doing guard duty for some new operation, small-scale mining. Well, they were digging anyway, but very carefully, like they were looking for something precious. I don’t know why we were there—they kept us in the dark—but our job was to guard the site and provide cover when helicopters or trucks came or went. That’s it. Our crew was so small that they had us all housed together, men and women. No separate facilities at all.”

  I swallowed hard.

  “There were only three of us—I mean, women.” He flinched at the word. “And, you know, it’s the army. We all take a lot of abuse, a lot of . . .” He cleared his throat, and when he spoke again, he was holding back tears. “I mean, we were under a lot of pressure, out in the Kush, not knowing what or who we were protecting. It just got ugly.”

  I sat on the edge of the bed and leaned back against the wall, so we were facing the same direction. I didn’t want to watch his face.

  “Ugly how?”

  He drew his knees back up to his chest, his voice a whisper. “This one guy, Barclay, he was hitting on me, nonstop, but I kept telling him no. Then one night, a bunch of us were hanging out after our shift, drinking beer. I went out to the priv, and he followed me there, told me he didn’t take no for an answer.” Carlos’s breath was tight and uneven. “I couldn’t fight him off. He just left me there, lying next to the latrine.”

  He was sobbing now, but I didn’t want to risk touching him. The shadowy gap between us grew cold.

  “Did you report it?”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Carlos shake his head.

  The sun was getting low, a golden beam pressing through the window and painting the dirty wall across from us a sickly peach.

  “I’m sorry that happened.”

  Somebody cranked up some reggaetón in one of the houses across the way. It was going to be another hot, loud night on Pierce Street.

  “Did he do anything else after that?”

  “No. I asked to be moved to the opposite shift—I didn’t say why. Barclay left me alone after that, and I just tried to do my job and go on with my life, you know? I only had two more months left in my hitch. But his buddies were always looking at me a certain way. He must have bragged to them.” Carlos nodded as if answering his own question. “Of course he did. What a big guy. What a triumph.”

  His bitterness swept across me, and I shivered. “Is that when you decided to become a man?”

  Beside me on the bed, Carlos stiffened. “Don’t be an idiot,” he hissed. “That’s not how it works.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  He let out a derisive laugh. “I thought you were the woke one, Martita. So sensitive! Defender of the downtrodden!” His mocking stabbed me to the core.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I can’t fucking trust anybody.”

  “I said I’m sorry.”

  It was getting dark, but neither of us moved to turn on a light. Instead, in my embarrassment, I got up and went out the door. I shouldn’t have. I should’ve stayed. Or at least taken a good last look at his face.

  * * *

  Pamela’s kid Paulina told me what happened next.

  I had let a week go by since that talk in Carlos’s room. I didn’t know if he wanted me around, and it seemed like everything I did or said was the wrong thing anyway. But once I resurfaced from my swamp of irritation and shame, I couldn’t find him. I called or texted a dozen times, but he never answered. Things were busy at the computer store where I worked, and I couldn’t go by his place at the Wayfarer until late Friday night. The guy across the hall said he hadn’t seen or heard anybody in that room for a couple days.

  I called my mom from the street outside. “Have you seen Carlos?”

  She made the humming noise she always did before she lied or held something back. “Today? No, mi amor. Not since yesterday.”

  “Yesterday? Where did you see him yesterday?”

  More humming. “Ah, well, she went to talk to her mom and—”

  “You should say he, Mami.”

  “Well, they had a little talk, and then I don’t know where she went.”

  “That’s it? You have no idea where he is now?” An icy feeling rushed down my spine. My mom could be evasive for a lot of reasons—politeness, shyness with strangers, fear—she did it all the time. But this felt different.

  “You could ask your tía.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  * * *

  First thing the next morning, a sticky July Saturday, I walked to Consuelo’s house. People were out washing their cars, the foamy water swirling with the crushed soda bottles and half-empty takeout containers in the gutters. Kids tore through yards on my aunt’s block, chasing each other with squirt guns. I stopped Paulina, my cousin Pamela’s daughter, as she whooshed by me on the sidewalk.

  “Hey!” She pulled away from me laughing. “If I stand still they’re going to get me.” She took off again, her long skirt tangling around her legs as she dodged an ambush by Nestor, her brother.

  On her next pass, I caught her again. “Hold up. I need to ask you something.”

  Paulina bent over, hands on her knees, huffing from the run. “What?”

  A paletero’s jangling bells caught the attention of the other kids, and they ran off toward National Avenue and ice cream. Paulina’s eyes followed them.

  “I’ll buy you a paleta in a minute, Lina.”

  Paulina held up her fingers in a V.

  “Okay, two paletas, but first you have to tell me: have you seen Carlos?”

  “We’re not supposed to call her that. Her name’s Carlisa.” At age nine, she was not ready to buck the lessons her Pentecostal parents were laying down about the strict line between the sexes.

  “But you saw her?”

  She nodded. “A few days ago, I guess. She went to Tía Consuelo’s and Tío Enrique’s house. My mom and dad brought her.”

  “What do you mean, brought her? She didn’t go on her own?” Then an even more uncomfortable question came to mind. “And why were you there?”

  She shrugged. “We were all there. Well, not you.” She pressed her lips together, her brown eyes dimming as it dawned on her that this might hurt my feelings.
“I mean, everybody who has a problem with Carlisa, they all wanted to talk to her and . . . Can I go now?”

  “No, tell me what you were going to say.” I gripped her shoulder, and she strained under my hand. “And what?”

  “Mom and Dad made her dress as a girl. They brought her to our apartment first, and Mom and I helped put her makeup on. And we curled her hair in front.”

  I imagined that black swoop of hair twisted on a curling iron and the image turned my stomach.

  The paletero was jingling his way down 33rd Street toward us. I dug into my back pocket for my wallet and gave Paulina a few dollars.

  “Thanks!” she said, running off toward the bells.

  * * *

  The chemical fruit smell of detergent wafted across Consuelo and Enrique’s porch, announcing laundry day. Consuelo answered the door.

  “Hi, tía,” I said, but she just lifted a plucked eyebrow and motioned me to follow her.

  She led me to the bedroom, where she resumed putting away my uncle’s shirts. “You here to apologize?”

  “Apologize? Me? For what?” Out of habit, I reached into the laundry basket on the bed to start matching socks.

  “You’re the one who opened the door to this. This tontería with my daughter.”

  “How?” I cuffed a pair of her gray socks and threw them back into the basket.

  “You two were always close. Too close, I thought. All those sleepovers. All the whispering. But your abuela was always like, Don’t worry, they’re just primas. Girl cousins are always that way.” Consuelo turned and pointed the crook of a clothes hanger at me. “But now look. I told your mother your gay experiment would come to no good.”

  I tossed the mountain of unmatched socks back into the basket and shoved my hands into my pockets to keep them from my aunt’s face. “It’s not an experiment. I’m twenty-seven years old, and I’ve been this way my whole life. And I didn’t make my cousin gay.”

  “No, you didn’t. Even worse. You gave my daughter the crazy idea of rejecting her whole identity. Of telling God that He made her wrong.” The fire in her eyes made them glow white. “You telling God He got Carlisa wrong, Marta?”

  “He didn’t get anything wrong. Carlos is perfect just the way he is.”

  Consuelo brought the corner of the hanger right up to my nose. “Don’t you ever say that name in my house again.”

  I set my hand on the wire and let the weight lower it. She allowed it to happen. Some of the anger drained from her face, leaving her looking pale and tired. She fished in the basket for another shirt.

  “Did Ronnie and Pamela bring my cousin over here the other night?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “I asked them to bring her so I could tell her that if she wanted to be part of this family, she was going to have to dress like a woman and act like a woman. And if she wasn’t willing to do that, I didn’t want to see her anymore. God didn’t give me a son. He gave me a daughter.”

  “You got Pamela and Ronnie to dress her up like some kind of doll to tell her that?”

  Consuelo smoothed her black hair with an awkward hand. “I thought she looked great.”

  “Yeah? How did his face look?” I stepped up to my aunt. “Happy to be made up like the daughter of your dreams?” I grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her into the closet doors. Her eyes filled with fear. “Happy? Did she look happy, tía?” I gave Consuelo another little shove then stormed out, sweeping the laundry basket onto the floor as I went.

  The house had been dark and cool. Outside on the sidewalk, the noon sun blinded me. I stumbled up the block, not realizing where my feet were taking me until I was halfway there.

  Ronnie sold cars at Arellano Motors on 37th Street, and he worked most Saturdays. I burst into the small sales room, where sweat I had earned walking the six hot blocks turned to ice in the air-conditioned space.

  “Where’s Ronnie?” I asked the secretary. She was in her seventies and matched the fading utilitarian decor perfectly, as if she were a fixture included when the place was built back in 1950.

  “He’s making a sale, dear.”

  I hadn’t noticed him in the lot out front, but Arellano’s spread their inventory onto all the side streets too, taking up valuable neighborhood parking spaces. It pissed people off. “Will he be back soon?”

  She squinted at her watch. “Oh, sure. He’s been out there for a while. Back in a few minutes, I’d guess.”

  I stood staring out at the rows of cars parked in the narrow lot. If I had seen Ronnie when I first came in, I would’ve punched him first then asked questions. The wait gave me time to settle down.

  This rage wasn’t new. I had felt it all along—every time some relative asked me when I was going to stop dating women and marry a man. Every time someone told me how pretty I’d look in a dress. Every time someone referred to my girlfriend as my roommate. The rage had simmered all that time, but I managed to keep a lid on it. Until today, shoving my aunt like that. I was sure everyone had heard about it already, Consuelo on the phone to my mother, to her other sisters, to Pamela.

  I had almost decided to step out and head home when Ronnie appeared. He was in full-on car-salesman mode, a fat pasted-on smile giving the impression that he was glad to see me. He even threw out his hand to shake before it clicked who I was. When he recognized me, he gave me a quick hug and kissed both my cheeks.

  “Marta, what brings you in? You buying a car today? What’re you driving these days, still that Toyota?”

  “I’m not here to talk cars, Ronnie. Where’s Carlos?”

  He put his thumbs in his belt loops and looked down at his shoes, chuckling like I just cracked a joke. Then he looked at me, his blue marble eyes glinting playfully. “I don’t think I know any Carloses. But I did see your cousin Carlisa on Thursday. She looked good.”

  I got right up into his face and whispered, “Don’t you call him that.”

  Over Ronnie’s shoulder, I noticed the secretary’s eyes widen. She dropped the paper she was holding and clenched the edge of the desk with her white fingers.

  “I heard she decided to re-up,” Ronnie said.

  “She’s going back to the army?”

  “Sounds like it.”

  That was news. But maybe he could reenlist as Carlos? Regardless, I could see how my cousin would choose living in a war zone in Afghanistan over the battle here in Silver City. At least the government would pay him to fight that war.

  “Good,” I said. “Anything to get away from you.”

  “Hey now, Marta, I didn’t have anything to do with her decision.”

  “Yes you did. And you know it too. Making her dress up for Consuelo’s little dog-and-pony show. Probably shoving your stupid Bible pamphlets in her face the whole time.” I felt a churn of bile in my throat.

  “Ronnie?” The secretary put her hand on the desk phone. “You’ve got a call waiting for you on line two.”

  The phone hadn’t rung since I’d been in there. I mad-eyed the secretary, and she looked down at her desk.

  “Well, I guess I’ve got to get back to it.” Ronnie patted my elbow. “I’ll take it in back, Betty.” At the door to the office, he paused. “Marta, it’s better this way. The army straightens out a lot of crooked lives, by God’s grace. Maybe it’ll stick this time.”

  I thought of what Consuelo had said at my niece’s birthday. I bet not so deep down inside Ronnie thought Carlos would be better off dead too.

  “If Carlos gets killed over there, Ronnie, I blame you!” I was shouting, but the door to the office had already closed.

  On my way back to my apartment, I texted Carlos: why did u go along with Ronnie n Pamela dressing u up like that?

  I didn’t get an answer.

  * * *

  The plan emerged over the next several days, a conflagration stoked by my guilt over insulting Carlos and my fury at Ronnie and Pamela and the rest.

  The only hard part was going to be havin
g to pretend I liked Ronnie for a few minutes.

  I drove to Arellano’s on Friday, almost a week after I’d confronted him there. I had a duffel bag in the backseat and my gun, a little Smith & Wesson 442 I kept for nighttime walks in the neighborhood, in my coat pocket. I didn’t like storing it there, so close to my heart, but the holster would’ve been too obvious.

  I pulled up behind Ronnie’s truck in the lot, parking him in just after seven, closing time. The summer sun was getting low, flashing through my windshield as I turned off the engine and got out.

  The bells hanging on the glass door announced my arrival, but nobody was there to notice. Betty’s desk chair was vacant, a cardigan sweater draped over the back. Through the frosted windows set in the wall dividing the waiting room from the offices, I watched Ronnie’s shadow moving from room to room turning off lights. Then the door swung open, and he saw me. It took a minute before his shaken face settled into the salesman’s mask.

  “Marta, what a surprise.”

  I shrugged, feeling the weight of the gun sliding against my ribs, and put my hands in the front pockets of my jeans. “Yeah, I just wanted to apologize. For the way I talked to you the other day.” I felt the twitch of a sneer at the corners of my mouth, so I looked down.

  Apparently, the move made me look genuinely ashamed because Ronnie moved to my side, wrapped his arm around my shoulders, and squeezed. “Hey, don’t feel bad. No real harm done.”

  I looked into his face. The deep blue eyes—the kind that show up in my Mexican family only by way of marriage—held that unctuous variety of Christian concern, Jesus forgiving me my sins by His indulgent proxy.

  “Yeah?” I faked relief with a smile and a shake of the head.

  “Sure.”

  As if the thought had just occurred to me, I said, “Hey, let’s hit Mamie’s. It’s blues night.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Marta.” Ronnie stepped to the wall behind Betty’s desk to key in the alarm code, then gestured to the door. “We’ve got thirty-five seconds.”

  Once outside, he locked the door and peered at his truck. “Pamela’s not really happy if I’m out after work.”